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<title>How Internet Searching Works</title>
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<H3>How Internet Searching Works</H3>

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No one organization owns or controls the Internet. While this
makes for an enviable degree of freedom to publish what you want,
it makes it hard to find things, because there is no central list
of everything on the Internet. In a very real sense, no one in the world knows where <I>everything</I> is on the Internet!
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Fortunately, some organizations have made great strides towards
cataloguing the contents of the Internet. In 1993, Carnegie-Mellon
University created a &quot;Web spider,&quot; a software &quot;robot&quot;
that could travel from point to point on the World Wide Web and
remember everywhere it had been. Carnegie-Mellon used this robot
to create a vast World Wide Web index called Lycos (after Lycosidae,
a variety of spider), and to this day continues to
employ it to expand and improve the Lycos index as the Internet grows.
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When you type a word, phrase, or Internet address into the &quot;Searching
The Internet&quot; text box and click Search, the words you have
entered are sent to a computer at Carnegie-Mellon which
maintains the Lycos index. This computer
searches the index and returns a &quot;report&quot; consisting
of the pages it knows about that match what you typed in. The
report includes an Internet shortcut for each page, so you can visit the pages
it found with a single click!
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